Internet-based organizations often maintain a plurality of servers that provide various services to users. Some of these organizations may provide a wide range of services, each of which may require execution of a special-purpose application within the plurality of servers. Due to memory limitations and/or licensing requirements, various special-purpose applications may be installed on only a small subset of servers within the plurality of servers. Many organizations use resource consolidation programs to reduce network operations and maintenance costs, while maintaining network capability and capacity. These resource consolidation programs often manage the decommissioning (either temporary or permanent) of redundant servers within a server pool. Typical resource consolidation programs may rely on operational metrics associated with various servers (e.g., a number of requests received by a server, network traffic received at the server, or an amount of data being processed by the server) to determine whether the server is a good candidate for decommissioning. However, some special-purpose applications may be rarely used, in which case the servers running those applications may be decommissioned based on the operational characteristics associated with those servers. This may ultimately result in the inadvertent unavailability of the special-purpose applications entirely.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other problems, individually and collectively.